Pageviews

Saturday, March 22, 2014

Is Facebook Dead?

Facebook. One of the largest and influential companies in the world today. They operate the largest social network in human history, with about 500 million members. With this kind of membership, it is almost guaranteed to never die, right? No, at least kind of. Facebook is dead in the sense that they are no longer the young, news-based, active network it used to be, but has cleverly worked in protection for itself into its very structure.

First, what has happened to Facebook. I have not been on my Facebook for months, if I have logged in at all it was probably to silence all of the annoying "you have notifications" e-mails I kept getting. My problem is that Facebook quickly became too much older family and not enough younger friends. I finally had it about 2 years ago and got a Twitter and an Instagram, which are luckily still very much alive. The second problem I have with Facebook now is that it doesn't seem to be a "real" social network anymore. Its mostly just baby pictures and huge paragraphs of stories from those aunts and uncles who spend way too long on there (no one in my family, but I've seen some other people's). To me, Facebook is dead, a place where older people occasionally check in to what is going on, with none of the youthful culture that used to exist. This doesn't necessarily mean that Facebook is going to come down tomorrow though.

The reason that Facebook is still alive is that it has worked its way into an alarmingly large number of things in our lives. Games, stores, even other social networks have a lot of people who sign up through connected Facebook accounts. This may be the single-handed best decision that Facebook made, because for me, its the only thing that is stopping me from deleting my account. That and the huge amount of family I have on there, who would grill me at the family reunion as to why I disappeared from Facebook.

So in conclusion, I wholeheartedly believe that Facebook as we know it is dead. Zuckerberg should really just brand it as a data repository to be used to have a central account for everything. I feel bad saying this, because I really admire Mark Zuckerberg, but to be honest, I don't see any future at all in what used to be the latest and greatest social site ever to grace this Earth. RIP.